I really, really want to like that side of the game. I love the idea of players pooling together their tiny, individual actions towards a greater shared goal and what it can bring in terms of RP and immersion. Having new content gated behind community participation is an awesome idea, and I totally get the idea of simulating a back and forth war between the players and the AI for the control of the Galaxy.
However, I can’t help but feel mostly frustrated with how it’s actually implemented, both in its presentation and in its actual mechanics.
On the presentation side, everything looks so half-hearted that it ends up feeling meaningless. Apart from the major order and a few flavor lines thrown together in a corner of the screen, there’s nothing that make us feel like the galactic war has any consequence on the lore of the game. Every few days we gain or lose a planet, but it doesn’t really feel like winning or losing: we just get our medals or we don’t, and then it’s mostly back to usual business. Even the consequences are not clearly shown: the apparition of bit gunship is a clear consequence of us not managing to capture To it, but I’m pretty sure the majority of the player base won’t even notice it and just think “well, I guess the update brought us some new enemy types, cool!”. I get minimalism, but I feel all of this would be so much better if we had small cutscenes to mark each important step, or even just a war room in the ship where we could read strategic reports or whatever, anything to give it more context.
On the gameplay side, the fact that the only available action the players can do to have an influence of the global war is to either launch “attack missions” on enemy planets or “defense missions” on a super earth planet feels very limited, especially since all missions are played very similarly. It just seems to devolve in a endless tug-of-war consisting of capturing a planet, then defending it over and over, with very few variations and very few reasons to care Gameplay-wise. How cool would it be if defense missions were actually about defending allied areas against an enemy invasion, with radically different objectives like supporting SEAF positions or defending strategic zones against waves of enemies?
To close up what is slowly starting to look like a wall of text, I just want to say that I don’t mean to sound whiny and that I actually really enjoy the game as it is. It just feels like a wasted opportunity to have this truly awesome idea and then do almost nothing with it.
What are your thoughts on this?
Edit: Also, just wanted to point out I realize that budgets exist and the galactic war probably wasn’t (and shouldn’t have been) their top priority. Getting the core gameplay was and still is more important than the rest.
I, apprehensively, hope it’s still just part of their growing pains. It boggles my mind to see sequels, time and again, leave behind good features and qualities that there were no reasons to drop. Load outs being a thing in HD1 but not 2 is frustrating. But I’m mainly referencing the galactic war. It was much less interactive on a granular level with no major orders or personal orders. But higher difficulties gave greater contribution to the war and you got a great sense of how your playtime actually affected the effort. Whether or not they are still tweaking numbers behind the scenes is debatable and they surely will never tell us since they love not telling us shit. But it really doesn’t feel like any particular time I play has any bearing on anything like it did in HD1. Best hope I can have is that we’ll get there eventually. Or maybe not and we just play this story out as they wrote it.
I think that’s also a problem endemic to this game being so much more popular and the major orders dictating a lot more than just moving around what planets you can fight on, like it was in 1.
They have to tightly control the flow of the war artificially to prevent us from washing over the map too quickly since they obviously have specific ideas of when they want us to get to new planets and they want to use certain planets to unlock certain things.
The numbers could be absurdly fudged just to ensure that we fail something for lore or roleplaying purposes, which is, I think, good.
The galactic war in the first was mile wide and inch deep, you just washed over the galaxy time after time and we won, basically, every single time, no surprises. It just didn’t matter. I’ll take the galactic war artificially mattering in a roleplay sense over it mechanically working predictably, but leading to severe repetition and the constant locking out of being able to fight certain races because everyone and their mom fought the terminids first.